


The Land of Nod

by HarveyWallbanger



Series: Melt! [2]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Melancholy and creepy, generally disturbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 01:03:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14321121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: Solve et coagula.





	The Land of Nod

**Author's Note:**

> The story takes place within the continuity of "The Language of Flowers", and references events of canon as of the episode, "That's Entertainment".  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

Rapid and shocking reversals are the stuff of science. They’re what make the whole thing worth it. You wouldn’t climb a mountain and expect to stay up there forever. If you didn’t crawl back down on your own, the mountain would shake you off. Nature abhors a vacuum. That’s what too much success is. It’s as barren as failure.  
Still, it is… nice to be consoled.  
Jervis’ arm around Jonathan’s shoulder as he sighs, “With the absence of our friends, it would appear we’re at loose ends.”  
But Jonathan looks at Jervis’ hand on his arm a little too long, he supposes, because Jervis draws it away.  
Jervis clears his throat. “And what about you, Mr. Freeze? We could do far more damage as three.”  
“That’s not my name, Houdini, and I’m not a babysitter. You two can do whatever you want, as long as you stay out of my way.”  
“And with that, the iceman leaveth,” Jervis says, trying not to sound bitter. He looks at Jonathan, his eyes too wide not to be asking a question without saying any words.  
“I want to go back to my lab,” Jonathan says, then adds, “You must also want to return home.”  
“It’s been too long,” Jervis murmurs. For a second, he looks like he’s going to say something else, but he just sucks his lower lip, his eyes still open too wide, as though the unsaid words are stacking up behind them.  
For all the police officers and jumpy spectators around, it’s easy to get away without anyone noticing. People look too hard, and it damages their ability to see. Right up to the second that Jervis is telling the man not to make a sound, the man doesn’t seem truly aware of what’s happening. Then, he’s smiling blithely, handing Jervis his car keys, tipping his hat, and walking in the opposite direction, toward the tide of traffic. Jonathan lies down in the back of the car. Even well away from the carnage, they can still hear the screams and sounds of metal against metal. Jervis laughs, an actual ‘Ha, ha’. Slowly, darkness sinks down over the city. Looking at the ceiling of the car, Jonathan watches the light change from gold to red to deep blue. Then, there is no light at all. When he was young, he asked his father why the sky was blue. Gerald had, characteristically, taken far too long to answer the question, and ended up on another subject altogether, leaving Jonathan to walk to the library, ask the librarian for the relevant volume, and learn the truth on his own. When he’d returned home, his mother had been beside herself. Gerald had told her that Jonathan was in the room with him, and then, when that proved false, in his own room, then, variously, in the living room, the kitchen, the yard, the bathroom. I looked everywhere for you, she sobbed, leaning over Jonathan to wrap her arms around his shoulders. By then, Gerald had left the room, shifted out of sight for another hour or day. Later, of course, Gerald wouldn’t let Jonathan out of his sight. It was almost like having two fathers, two childhoods. If Jonathan was two people, now, Jonathan and the Scarecrow, maybe that was why. Gerald was father to one; Dr. Crane to the other.  
Though, of course, Jonathan knows that there’s only one of him. They might have been content to let him rot in Arkham, but his actual madness lasted a very short time. It was like a slow clearing of fog at night. Once the fog was gone, the darkness remained. You still couldn’t see, but you were finally aware of how much you couldn’t see. Now, you knew the possibilities of what might be in the dark around you. You saw their eyes, their minute movements, the moonlight touching fur and claw. You finally knew enough to be afraid.  
“Home again, home again, though with no plum bun,” Jervis sighs, “Home again, home again, market is done.” He turns off the car, and comes around to the back to open Jonathan’s door. Jonathan looks at Jervis, framed by the door, upside-down. “Home again, home again, jiggity-jig,” Jervis says, smiling faintly. Jonathan sits up. Jervis’ eyes are tired.  
Together, they push the car into a pond, and walk the rest of the way to the house, in the dark and the late-evening chill. On a distant road, cars roar and susurrate like strange beasts, indifferent by virtue of their bulk and age to human beings.  
“A cozy hearth and a cup of tea, that’s for me,” Jervis huffs, “And for you?”  
“My lab,” Jonathan says.  
“Shall I make you a cup of tea?”  
“If you would be so kind.”  
“I don’t mind, and to fail to offer would be unkind.”  
In the foyer, Jonathan lingers. The house is empty and silent, yet the drafts seem to give it a kind of breath. In its way, it lives and breathes around them. “A perfect haunted house,” Jonathan says.  
“To science with you, not poetry,” Jervis says jokingly, “In time, I’ll bring you your cup of tea.”  
The smell of the lab has lodged itself in the place in Jonathan’s brain that recalls the scent of home. It’s bound up, now, in cerebral thread, with all of the homecomings after summer vacations. August, mildew, his mother’s potpourri, his father’s papers. February, chemicals, scrubbed glassware, new notebooks and ballpoint pens. Jonathan’s working- it could be an hour, it could be all night. Time doesn’t apply when you’re working. It’s not ‘time’; it’s just ‘working’. You fall out of time. You go someplace else. There, no one knows you, and even if they did, no one could see you. You’re just a brain. There’s no one else, anyway. It’s just your mind. The brown smell of leaves and flowers drifts in through the mask’s pores.  
“Thank you,” Jonathan says, and takes the cup from Jervis.  
“And now, I shall retire,” Jervis says. The question is implied. So implied that Jonathan isn’t obliged to answer. Jonathan’s answer is not, however, implied. For that, they’ll both have to wait. Even Jonathan doesn’t know what it will be.  
But then, somehow, it’s morning, and the night is gone; the question, spent. As Jonathan lies down on the couch in the lab, he hears, in the distance, the sound of the pipes in the kitchen filling with water.  
Of course, ultimately, none of this really matters at all.

When he wakes up, it’s dark. There comes the cloying old feeling of having napped away the afternoon, waking up in your room at night. No one came to look for you, to coax you back to the waking world, to yourself. You’re utterly forgotten. Life continued without you. It’s like stepping through a mirror: it’s backwards, now, and it feels good to have been forgotten. There’s no one left to care for you, and the further you plunge into forgetting, the further away you get from everyone else.  
But it must make him stupid, somehow, because even though Jonathan knows that he’s safe, having been forgotten, being invisible, no longer existing, melancholy fogs over his brain, and he can’t think about the things he wants to think about. The house is empty, now, even with him and Jervis in it. Jerome was loud and anxious and impatient. He beat like the house’s heart, made its walls sing red. He was a nuisance, but all life is a nuisance. Until it’s gone, and you find yourself missing it. All dead things are lonely. None more than those that know they’re dead. Arkham was never quiet. The guards were monsters, but some of them almost had human eyes. Some of them sometimes looked sad. One of them once muttered, “I got a kid your age,” and Jonathan doesn’t recall ever seeing him again. Even now, it’s so difficult to remember so much of it that it doesn’t seem to have been very much time at all. Time didn’t seem to pass for Gerald. On school breaks, he’d spend days in his study, emerging in the same clothes he’d been wearing when he’d entered. What would he make of having been dead for three years? What would he make of Jonathan having been in Arkham for three years? He’d ask Jonathan to account for his time. “Well, Johnny, what did you do with it all? Make good use of it?” Of course he did. Jonathan became someone else.  
If his brain isn’t going to work, he might as well just give up. He turns off the light in the lab. He starts down a hallway, and not finding what he’s looking for, turns around and continues in the opposite direction. He’s on his way upstairs when out of the gloom, comes Jervis, hatless but with his coat on over his robe and pajamas.  
“Forgive, please, this liberty, but here I am; you’ve found me.” His smile looks strained.  
“Yes. I was looking for you. I want to go to sleep, now.”  
Jervis links his arm with Jonathan’s. “To the county of Bedfordshire.”  
Without being asked, Jervis leaves the room while Jonathan undresses. It strikes Jonathan as odd. Usually, once people see something you’d kept hidden, they think that it’s theirs, now, too. They can look at it whenever they want to. If they’d even asked to see it the first time, they never ask again. In a way, it makes Jonathan feel more exposed. Jervis uncovers him more by putting a wall and a door between them.  
“You can come in,” Jonathan says.  
Speaking as he does, Jervis comes out of the bathroom. He swallows the words.  
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Jonathan’s finally able to make his voice sound this way all the time, even when he’s not wearing the mask, and it pleases him.  
All Jervis says is, “Aren’t you cold?”  
It hadn’t occurred to Jonathan that he might be. Until Jervis said something, he wasn’t. Slowly, he gets into bed, but only pulls the sheets up to his chest.  
“I confess-” Jervis says, sitting down gently on the edge of the bed, as though he might damage either it or himself, “I had hoped- That is to say, I didn’t want you to shy away, after what- after what we did.”  
Jonathan blinks. That feels like it happened with another person. Not ‘to’. With. As though there were three of them, Jonathan, the Scarecrow, and someone else. It was this last person who was involved. The other two- nowhere to be found. Obviously, Jonathan remembers, and he must have been thinking about it as he took off his clothes, decided not to put on his pajamas, told Jervis to come back into the room, but it was a strange kind of thinking, so that he was barely aware of having the thoughts. Maybe there really is another person, and it was him. Leaving Jonathan, now, to deal with what he’s done.  
“I had feared,” Jervis continues, “that it was something you’d simply sought to inflict upon James Gordon.”  
“It was,” Jonathan says, “I wanted him to look, and be unable to look away.”  
“I see,” Jervis says stiffly.  
“But that’s over. I want to try it again. I don’t need anyone to look, now.”  
“I’ll say no more,” Jervis says. Jonathan watches him take off his clothes. Usually, Jervis moves slowly, as though admiring himself in a mirror that only he can see. Suddenly, his movements stutter, leaving him pinned between haste and hesitation. He swears over the knot in the sash of his robe. He swears at the cold. He throws aside the sheets, then throws them over himself.  
His hands are cold, but the rest of him is warm. It’s poor circulation. Gerald used to tell Jonathan and his mother when people Gerald met had cold hands. A private complaint, a private joke. How much like a soothsayer or a magician Gerald must have felt in pronouncing another’s ill health, forecasting their eventual doom. Jonathan puts Jervis’ cold hands on his body, kisses his warm mouth. The stitches in Jervis’ right hand are rough on Jonathan’s skin. There’s a scar that Jonathan likes, on Jervis’ throat. Like the wound on his hand, its author was Jim Gordon. Jervis lost a tooth in a fight with Captain Barnes, who ended up in Arkham, too. It seems like all of Gotham’s life flows between those two points, Jim Gordon and Arkham. No, not all. But what does everyone else do? Where does everyone else go? Jonathan presses up against Jervis, his mouth on Jervis’ scar as he touches Jervis. Not for the first time, Jervis says his sister’s name. Another point, a place to start. They may all end up the same way, but once, they were different people. They were themselves.  
“I’m not Alice,” Jonathan says, and then, before Jervis can answer, “Look at me.”  
Jervis laughs. It’s usually him telling other people to look into his eyes. Jonathan tells him again to look, and he does, holds his eyes on Jonathan as Jonathan gets him off. It’s something you never really get used to, what people are like, like this. It’s weird. Is it really them? Is it someone else who inhabits them, for just a moment? Sometimes, they don’t even look human. Most of the time, now, Jonathan doesn’t look human at all.  
Jervis kisses his mouth, his hand, sucks his fingers, turns him onto his back. Jonathan hears himself sigh. This is what he thinks of, when he thinks of being at Gordon’s house, in his bed. Being covered by another person’s body is like disappearing. If it’s someone you trust, that you know isn’t going to hurt you, you can let yourself vanish into them. Jonathan holds on tightly to Jervis. Jervis’ hands are no longer cold. The right one still doesn’t work properly, so he uses his mouth. Jonathan pulls the sheets up over his head, over both of them. They’re both somewhere else, they’ve gone out of the world. Though he can't see, he keeps his eyes on Jervis, moves with him, holds his hand over Jervis’ stitched hand. In the dark, they could be one body, an unimaginable organism completing some unfathomable bodily function. He comes in Jervis’ mouth. There’s no one there to see, now, so Jervis doesn’t hesitate before kissing Jonathan’s mouth, full and deep. Still kissing him, breathing heavily, Jervis pulls back the sheets. He takes his mouth away from Jonathan’s, rests his head on Jonathan’s shoulder. Trembling a little, he breathes. Jonathan gives him a moment before pulling the sheets back over their heads. Again, they disappear.  
They’ve gone someplace else. They’re nowhere. For a moment, Jonathan lets himself believe this, and it brings unspeakable relief. It’s like falling asleep. The whole world vanishes, or you recede from it. While you’re not there- it goes on without you.  
It’ll go on for a long time. Even though he knows it isn’t true, Jonathan lets himself think it: they’ve gone someplace else, and they aren’t coming back.


End file.
